Excellent tools for organizing writing. Ample collection of templates. Competitive price. Multiple installs allowed. Also available for Windows and iOS.

Cons

No web app. No native collaboration features.

Bottom Line

Built with writers in mind, Scrivener 3 has everything you need to research, compose, organize, edit, and finish a piece of writing, all for a ridiculously reasonable price.

Scrivener, now in version 3 for Mac, is one of the best pieces of software for writers because it was built with their needs in mind. Whether you're pounding out endnotes for a nonfiction book or slowly crafting characters to set loose in your next novel, Scrivener provides a place to create, edit, and organize all your work, especially long-form pieces. Considering Scrivener for Mac costs a one-time fee of only $45 (there's a version for Windows as well), the app has a lot more to it than you might expect. Scrivener is PCMag Editors' Choice writing app for Mac and Windows users.

While many writers appreciate Scrivener's treasure trove of features, others see its WYSIWYG formatting, collection of templates, and long list of menu options as potential distractions from the writing itself. An alternative app that eliminates excess in favor of simplicity is Ulysses for Mac, the Editors' Choice among distraction-free writing apps. One more high-scoring writing app worth mentioning is Final Draft, which specifically caters to the needs of professional screenwriters. Final Draft is more expensive than nearly any other app in this category, but it continues to be an industry standard in film and television.

Price and Platform

Scrivener 3 is available for macOS for $45. Students and academics get a discount, bringing the price down to $38.25. Anyone who purchased Scrivener 2 on or after August 20, 2017, is eligible for a free upgrade. Anyone with an earlier copy of Scrivener 1 or 2 for Mac can upgrade for $25. There's a 30-day trial, and those 30 days are counted based on active use, not calendar days.

A new version of Scrivener for Windows is expected to release in early 2018 but it is not available as of this writing. If you buy a copy of the current version (it's technically version 1; the company is skipping number 2 for the Windows version) now, you can upgrade to version 3 for free upon its release. If you need both the Mac and Windows version, the bundle costs $75.

Note that this review focuses mainly on the Mac version because, at the moment, it's more up to date than the Windows version. I'll update it to reflect the changes to the Windows version when the latest Microsoft-centric version is available.

You can install Scrivener on as many computers in your household as you need, although only for one platform. In other words, if you buy the Mac app, you can install it on as many macOS machines as you need, but not Windows computers, and vice versa.

An iOS app sells separately for $19.99, and it can sync with the Scrivener Mac app, so long as you use iCloud or another online storage service, such as Dropbox, to save your work. With the app, you can edit or write from nearly anywhere. Many of the same functions for editing and rearranging your work, looking at reference material, and so forth, are also available in the mobile app. If you already own the iOS app, which works on both iPhone and iPad, you do not need to pay for any additional upgrades to it at this time. There is no Scrivener Android app.

No matter how you slice it, Scrivener's price is extremely competitive. The iOS app sounds expensive, but if you consider the fact that the final price is $65 for both the Mac and iOS app (and keep in mind that Scrivener is full-featured software) it's a steal. With more and more apps moving toward a subscription model, it's refreshing to see a few holdouts, such as Scrivener, stick to one-time pricing.

Ulysses, which is one of Scrivener's primary competitors, recently started charging a recurring subscription fee of $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Formerly, it cost $44.99. Ulysses is Mac-only, however. Adobe Story charges a recurring $9.99 per month fee as well. Among writing apps, Adobe Story is in a different class, however, because it's designed for people to not just write but also produce scripts to be used in film and television production. For example, Adobe Story has tools for summarizing and tracking shoot locations.

The price for writing apps, in general, is all over the map. Storyist costs a flat $59, while Script Studio charges $199.95. Earlier I mentioned Final Draft, which costs a whopping $249.99—that's for a very specialized tool, however.

There's another class of writing apps that are considered distraction-free apps in part because they lack many features that might distract you. They tend to cost only $10 or so. iA Writer and WriteRoom are two examples. These apps are fine for short-form writing, but they don't the necessary tools, such as a sidebar library or binder, for organizing and revising longer pieces.

New in Scrivener 3

Version 3 contains significant improvements to Scrivener's design and functionality. An interface facelift freshens up the overall look of the app, making it much easier than it had been to stare at Scrivener all day long (such is the unfortunate relationship between writers and their software).

Functionally, the compile feature has new improvements that make it more flexible and easier to use. Compiling is similar to exporting a project, but it is specific to writers' needs. For example, let's say you want to send a copy of a file to a publication for review, and this publication requires a specific font and line spacing. The publication also doesn't want your foreword at the time of submission. The compile features allow you to omit parts of your draft, such as the foreword, and change some of the formatting of the exported file without changing anything in your original pages.

Scrivener 3 includes a new Writing Statistics feature that keeps track of a wealth of information about your writing. Many writers like statistics so that they can make sure they hit a daily word count. Scrivener's statistics include even more information, such as the average paragraph length, average sentence length, and even the frequency of word use. It has tools for estimating the number of pages your text will take up in a paperback book.

A few other changes in version 3 include the ability to export to Epub 3, improvements to exporting to Kindle, enhancements to the outlining tools, and the ability to refer to up to four documents at a time in the main window with a new feature called Copyholders. On macOS specifically, Scrivener now supports the Touch Bar, and the underlying codebase was updated to make the whole app faster and more stable.

What Makes Scrivener Different?

What strikes me about Scrivener is how much more it looks like typical office software than other writing apps do. Menus, buttons, view modes, formatting tools, statistics, annotations, labels, keywords, uploads, and so forth. There's a lot to explore. More important, however, the app is well structured, which makes it easy to use.

The first time you launch Scrivener, you begin with an interactive tutorial, which helps you learn the ropes. The tutorial takes the form of a manuscript so that you're reading about the app while you're also using it. It makes sense, but the tutorial is epically long. Thankfully, you don't have to read all of it at once. Getting started is easy enough, and you can return to the tutorial pages whenever you're ready to learn something new.

With or without the tutorial, most people will be able to figure out how to create new pages and folders without much help. The interface will be familiar to anyone remotely comfortable with software programs in general. You compose in the center part of the interface and use the left pane to organize your files into folders. You can drag and drop files into different folders to rearrange their order. Using control+click on any file or folder opens up new options. The primary menu appears at the top. A few handy indicator icons show up at the bottom. It's all straightforward.

Within 5 or 10 minutes of poking around, I had thrown in a few dummy chapters of text, added footnotes and comments, created research files such as character sheets with images, and begun experimenting with different views that might help me focus while composing. The appropriately named Composition Mode puts your active file into a full screen view, darkening everything behind it. Mousing to the bottom of the screen reveals a toolbar with a slider that lets you can control the opacity. In other words, you can block out everything on your desktop from view, or you can merely dim the desktop if you still want to see whatever applications you've left open behind Scrivener.

The Composition Mode toolbar has character and word counts, a text zoom tool, inspector info (where you can put notes and metadata about the chapter or section for reference), keyword info, a slider for changing the width of the composition box, and more. I could see how one might make the case that there's too much stuff packed into Composition Mode, but at least most of it disappears when your cursor isn't at the bottom of the screen.

When starting a new project, you can begin from scratch with a blank page, or you can rely on one of Scrivener's many templates. Some of the options include novel, novel with parts, screenplay, documentary script, BBC taped drama, APA paper, MLA paper, Chicago Manuscript style essay, general nonfiction, research proposal, and several others. For writers who need help with the most basic structure, these templates are useful. For example, the templates suggest components of the work that are often included and provide sample text, such as a title page and foreword where appropriate, but they don't require that you use them. Once you copy a template to use, everything in it becomes editable, so you're not locked into the suggestions.

Notable Features

Scrivener includes WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) formatting, which some other writing apps eschew. The belief is that formatting tools are the work of the devil, or at least that they distract writers from focusing on what's most important: the writing. If you have a tendency to spend hours playing with typefaces instead of typing, Scrivener might not be for you.

The benefit of WYSIWYG is its ease of use, because the alternative is to use Markdown language. Markdown is a simplified set of characters that are used in place of formatting. If you've ever typed asterisks around a word in a chat app to denote it should be bold, that, in a nutshell, is Markdown. Pound or hash symbols indicate headings and subheadings, depending on how many you use. Putting a plus sign around text means it's a comment rather than part of the work, and so forth.

The writing app Ulysses uses only Markdown for formatting. There are no visible options for changing how the text is styled. If you're not supremely knowledgeable about Markdown, Ulysses has a cheat sheet showing the codes, and there are some menu selections and keyboard shortcuts for applying the Markdown. But the point is that Ulysses makes it difficult for you to be distracted by how your text is styled.

Scrivener 3 actually does support Markdown to some extent, but it's not fundamental to the software the way it is in Ulysses. You can import text with Markdown into Scrivener. There's a Copy Special option for copying Markdown text. Among the export options is a MultiMarkdown format. But most people who love writing in Markdown language probably won't love Scrivener the same way they might love Ulysses. Ulysses is designed for Markdown and Scrivener is designed for people more comfortable with WYSIWYG.

Another notable feature in Scrivener is its Corkboard view. Here you can look at your chapters or sections as if they were cards pinned to a board, and rearrange them by dragging and dropping. It's a handy organizational tool, especially for longer or more complicated works.

Final Draft has tools for making notes, too, and they're much more advanced than Scrivener's. But they're also more specific to screenwriting. In Final Draft, for example, you can also lay out cards on a corkboard-like space to map out the beats of your script, but here you can even target them for a specific page of the script. If the turning point of your plot needs to happen by page 26, you can note it textually on the card and visually on a page timeline. Scrivener doesn't offer that level of detail.

One simple feature I love in Scrivener is Split Screen view. When enabled, it divides your writing window vertically and puts another view of the same content below. Whenever I revise material, I end up scrolling back and forth to check what I've already written. This Split Screen allows you to write in one window while referring to the same text in a second window without losing your place. The Split Screen view isn't unique to Scrivener, but it's useful enough to be worth mentioning.

Exporting and Collaborating

At the end of your writing phase, you'll probably want to get your manuscript out of Scrivener and into the hands of an agent or publisher. Scrivener offers a number of exporting options: HTML, DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, as well as OpenOffice (ODT), Final Draft (FDX), Final Draft 5-7 File Converter (FCF), and Fountain Screenplay (Fountain).

Scrivener doesn't have any native collaboration features, such as co-authoring tools or the ability to share a file with someone and let them add comments or make suggestions. Google Docs mastered that feat years ago, as did Final Draft. Even Evernote supports collaboration, as long as you buy the right tier of service. With Scrivener, collaboration capabilities simply aren't included, although you can hack your way to them using third-party tools, such as Draft. It takes some configuration, but it's possible.

Missing Pieces

Scrivener is rich in features, but there are still some significant improvements it could make. In an ideal world, I'd want all writing apps, Scrivener included, to offer storage and syncing natively, and for them all to have a web app. As mentioned, Scrivener can sync your files, but only if you use a third-party storage service, and only between devices that have the Scrivener app installed. If you're in a jam and need to use someone else's computer, you can't get at your work. If Scrivener offered a web app to paying customers, they could at least access any of their files in a pinch. An Android app would also be very useful.

It's fairly common to see a web app and native storage and syncing among note-taking apps, but not writing apps. Note-taking apps, however, often charge a recurring subscription fee, which you don't have to pay when you use Scrivener.

Native storage and syncing would also make it much easier to offer native file-sharing and collaboration. It's hard to have lived with the effortless collaboration capabilities of Google Docs for so many years and then realize Scrivener doesn't offer any collaboration at all. Final Draft does, but even in that app, only one person can edit a file at a time. And everyone who collaborates must own a copy of the rather expensive software.

Other writing apps I've tested have some neat features that don't make or break them but that are worth mentioning just to give a sense of what else is out there. In Ulysses, I was ga-ga over a really simple feature that let me preview a sample page of my manuscript before I exported it. It's a big deal because depending on what kind of export option you choose, you might want or not want comments and annotations to appear. I also liked being able to see how the final style and formatting would look before asking Ulysses spit out a 200-page PDF.

Built for Writers

Scrivener is one of the best apps for writers because it was built to give them the tools they need to draft ideas, compose words, edit, organize, and output their works. It's inexpensive, and the fact that you can install it on multiple machines adds value because you can work on your writing from any computer or iOS device with the app. That's not nearly as convenient as note-taking apps that come with their own storage and web apps, which allow you to get at your text from any device with a browser, but I'll take what I can get.

The app is packed with features that could take you a while to explore, but it's also structured in a way that lets you jump right in if you'd prefer to stick with the basics and just get on with writing. If Scrivener isn't what you need, I recommend trying Ulysses instead.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio